The column looks at our challenge as B2B marketers aligning with sales and maintaining a strategic focus on revenue, and it examines how this relates to our frequent over-focus on marketing qualified leads (or MQLs, a term coined by SiriusDecisions) in our demand generation programs.

With good reason (as I’ve been hard at work finishing this project up), but no more. I’m pleased to announce that …

Balancing the Demand Equation: The Elements of a Successful Modern B2B Demand Generation Model is now set to be released via New Year Publishing in hardcover on Amazon on September 19. (Click here to pre-order your copy.)

It also will be available on iBook, Kindle and Nook shortly thereafter.

I’m particularly excited to announce the book’s release to the community of B2B marketers I’ve worked so closely with over the years. I think this is a book you’ll find very useful in helping to take your B2B demand generation programs to the next level. And I look forward to your feedback on it.

As I note in the book’s description:

The goal of the book is to help B2B marketers fundamentally transform their demand generation approach – building perpetual, buyer-centric programs that contribute to predictable and sustainable revenues for their organizations. The book also helps B2B marketers re-position their role, from tactical execution manager to that of strategic demand-chain manager – a critical shift.

B2B marketers need more than a minor course correction. They need a massive overhaul in their approach to B2B demand generation. Balancing the Demand Equation delivers both the rationale and approach to help B2B marketers succeed in this re-alignment and to emerge as leaders in the new B2B demand chain.

Just before Thanksgiving I published the second installment in a two-part series on the “Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan.”

I’ve done a number of posts over time on the various holistic elements that go into successful B2B demand generation here on Propelling Brands, on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog and more recently on the Left Brain Marketing (LBM) DemandGen (r)Evolution blog.

Yet I note in this new LBM post that despite all the tips and tricks out there in guides, blog posts and Tweets, for a lot of marketers there still seems to be a ‘glaring gap':

How do you build a modern demand generation program? What does that entail? Where do you start? What are the keys to success?

I think this is the real disconnect for many B2B marketers today. They do not really understand what it looks like to architect an entire, modern demand generation program, end-to-end – one that is appropriate for a marketing environment in which power has shifted from sellers to buyers and where Web 2.0 realities predominate. These B2B marketers need a way to sort out how all of these tactical systems and advice in blog posts and through consultants all come together in a real program.

I argue in the first post in the series that starting place should be a thoughtful and comprehensive demand generation plan. I then proceed to outline the initial research and analysis required to start with developing your plan — a first step in the process I refer to as establishing ‘buyer-targeting context.’

Source: Left Brain Marketing; click to enlarge

I then use the second post in the series to explain how you translate this initial research and analysis into actual demand generation programs — a second step in the process I refer to as ‘program translation.’

This is the same process we go through with clients of Left Brain Marketing to help them develop their own demand generation programs, so the content of these two posts is well-grounded in reality. (I also provide a number of slides right out of our decks as illustrative graphics in part two.)

I end the second post by noting:

There is certainly more to say around the details and best practices of building out your sub models and of operating and refining your demand generation program. … Nonetheless, I hope this post and the previous one represents a good starting place for wrapping your head around how to approach and build a successful demand generation plan.

And I really do believe these two posts are a good starting place — and a comprehensive reference source — for your own B2B demand generation programs.

Despite increasing adoption of marketing automation technology, “[w]e’re really bad at lead nurturing as B2B marketers,” I explain in the post. I subsequently dig into the disconnects, and I recommend a strategic ‘layered’ approach to rationalize nurturing programs.

So where is the gap in our lead nurturing? In the post I look at three realizations that are critical to successfully developing and positioning your lead nurturing. Specifically, it’s critical for B2B marketers to realize:

The resultant call-out is the need for a model to better think through how to build a successful lead nurturing program – balancing lead-flow goals with the need to engage the modern B2B buyer and giving you a foundation for building out nurturing tracks within your marketing automation system.

My ‘layered’ model – which the post explains in more detail – is one approach to rationalizing and organizing your lead nurturing tracks as part of your overall B2B demand generation program. (And it is something we are leveraging at Left Brain Marketing in our client engagements.)

In the post I note:

Successful lead nurturing requires thinking in terms of a matrix of potential content offers and reactions on the part of the B2B buyer – all of which are designed to help support the buying process, accelerate decision-making and orchestrate content dialogue with that buyer.

…

It’s impossible to envision every single choice a buyer will make in every situation, but you can understand if a buyer is ‘on track’ or off, and have an approach to getting buyers back on the right track.

The idea for this post came after “some interesting, recent interactions with marketing and sales professionals around the concept of demand generation.” I note in the post that “… these interactions have led me to believe this concept is nothing short of highly misunderstood.”

So I put a stake in the sand with this post – asserting my belief that demand generation is a strategic activity; that it is in fact the charter of B2B marketing; and that it spans and should be defined in terms of our holistic interaction with buyers throughout their buying lifecycles.

“It’s the art of educating buyers and nurturing these relationships from earliest awareness through to maximizing customer lifetime value. It’s about sparking, nurturing and monetizing initial demand; it’s also about sustaining and growing that demand among current customers. It’s the whole thing.”

The post subsequently analyzes three aspects of this issue:

One, it looks at exactly why there is this disconnect among B2B marketers in the definition and scope of demand generation.

The post opens by recounting the ‘first evolution’ of content marketing — i.e., the evolution of the topic up until recently:

The last year has brought growing dialogue around content marketing as an integral component of modern B2B demand generation.

First, we’ve seen increasing acknowledgement that, in a Web 2.0 world, the dynamics of the B2B buyer are shifting and that at the core of these new dynamics are fundamental shifts in buyers’ information consumption patterns. Buyers are doing more education on their own, ahead of speaking with a salesperson. Second, this has occurred in tandem with growing interest among B2B marketers both with inbound marketing strategies for lead generation and with marketing automation as a central platform for nurturing B2B prospects in a buyer-driven fashion.

Content marketing is the architecture behind information exchanged with the buyer before we can get them to ’sales ready’; it is the rationalization of what content that our prospective buyers need at various stages of the buying cycle and via what media and channels; and it is integral to the nurturing process. Content thus has moved from tactical to strategic.

It then asks, ‘So what’s next for the dialogue around content marketing?’

Now we are entering a second phase of dialogue and evolution around content marketing, where we’re talking about how to take it forward.

The post then analyzes three emerging dialogue threads around content marketing, its integration with marketing automation and its role in modern, buyer-centric B2B demand generation — also citing a number of marketing experts, such as content marketing ‘guru’ Joe Pulizzi, and relaying their perspectives on this evolving topic.

These threads are:

Building out the new era of dynamic, buyer-driven content marketing campaigns

Closing the loop so that it’s clear what content has impact and how to tune your content mix

Developing the right skill set and building the right team to effectively manage your B2B organization’s content marketing ‘machine’

The intent of a mass one-to-one strategy is to close an emerging sales-cycle gap — where the buyer is seeking information and having dialogue about a purchase, but is doing so on his/her own terms, mostly online (including via social media) and prior to ever engaging a sales team member. The strategy thus attempts to fill this gap by having marketing replicate and replace some of the engaged, ‘customer-centered selling’ interaction a sales team member might have pursued before the nature of the buyer began changing. The strategy focuses more on initially responding to ‘pull’ and initial ‘inbound’ activity and on conforming to the buyer’s cycle than on driving interruptive ‘push’ tactics. This means knowing the buyer better than ever before. It also means marketing has a more strategic … and complex … role than ever before.

Source: iStockphoto

The good news is that the same Internet that brought this change also is fostering new tools to respond to it. By embracing a holistic lead management strategy and by deploying a robust marketing automation platform, marketers can get start to get some control. In fact, mass one-to-one sounds great and is more achievable once you have technology like this in place. Yet most marketers will admit that the idea of building an endless number of dynamic, anticipatory, customer-triggered campaigns for some infinite number of customer types and scenarios is daunting. Where do you stop? How do you get any economies of scale? Such a commitment of time and resources — without limits — can result in a declining return that does not match the investment.

So how do we get our arms around this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing and get going with mass one-to-one without blowing a gasket? In particular, how do we focus our marketing automation campaigns to get the most bang for our buck?

I believe the answer — the ‘secret sauce’ — more than ever is personas.